


Cymbidium

by marmolita



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, POV Second Person, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, and about black sky, but not a /reader fic, theories about the hand and the chaste
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 14:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6379210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmolita/pseuds/marmolita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You've already lived most of a lifetime when you fuck it all up and fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cymbidium

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for all of season 2 and wild speculation on what a Black Sky might be.

You've already lived most of a lifetime when you fuck it all up and fall in love.

Her name is Sophie Keo and she's a defector from The Hand. Half your age, wild and deadly, she overpowers you and gets her sword on your throat the night you meet. If she hadn't wanted to defect you'd be dead, sliced open like a ripe melon. Instead, you warily welcome her into The Chaste, and she becomes a valuable member of your team.

At first you keep her at arm's length, but you've never been good at avoiding emotional attachment no matter how hard you try. One night you're raiding a Hand facility, looking for an artifact said to be part of the Black Sky activation sequence, and your self control fails completely. Back to back with her, breathing hard, both of you soaked to the elbows with blood and surrounded by a circle of dead bodies, the scent of her arousal hits you like a tidal wave. You have sex right there in the middle of the mess, no protection, no precautions. Sophie has never been the cautious type, but you have, you _have_ , and yet she's overwhelmed your senses until you're not sure what's left of yourself.

The Chaste is called The Chaste for a reason, and you've sworn never to pass on your genes, but when she tells you she's pregnant you don't worry about it as much as you probably should. She's a carrier, obviously, like you, but the chances of your child getting the right genes in the right variation are still so slim that you both decide it's worth the risk. The child might not even be a carrier, and if they are, they will join the fight along with the two of you.

Still, you and she decide it's for the best to send her away, secluded in a safe house where The Hand won't know about the child. You don't tell the rest of The Chaste about the pregnancy or her location -- you tell them she died on one of your missions, and they accept that. You can't visit very often if you want to keep her safe, but when you do you marvel at her growing belly. You put your hands on it, feel the baby kick, and pray to whoever is listening that this isn't the biggest mistake of your life.

*

The child is a girl. You name her Eliana after your mother and Soriya after Sophie's grandmother, and you decide to wait to have her genes tested, in case The Hand is monitoring the testing facilities. Little Ellie is bright and lively, always moving, never content to sit still. You visit every few months and are amazed at how fast she grows. She doesn't know you're her father for her own safety, but she trusts you because her mother trusts you.

She's a carrier, Sophie tells you when Ellie is three years old. She's just a little too quick and too sensitive to be a normal child. A little too prone to violence. You stroke Sophie's hair and tell her it will be okay, but you can hear her heart racing.

*

You get word one day that The Hand is tracking down their loose ends, and you make it to the safe house as fast as you can.

You're too late for Sophie, but you get there before they find Ellie, secreted away in a panic room under the house. You murder every last one of the assassins so they won't be able to carry any intelligence back, then you let yourself have a moment with Sophie, bleeding out onto the wood floor. "Promise me," she says, "promise me you'll take care of her. One way or another. Promise me."

"I promise," you say, trembling at the determination in her voice. And then, the determination is gone along with her breath, and you pull Ellie from the wreckage and take her home. She doesn't flinch at the sight of all the blood, but she cries for her mother, afraid of being alone in the world. "You're not alone," you tell her, "I'll always be here for you."

You have her tested the day you bring her back. It takes weeks for the results to come back, and when they do, you're chilled to the depths of your bones. The test is positive, not just for being a carrier, but full expression of the Kurozora variant gene.

First, you send your soldiers to wipe out the testing center's records and kill anyone who might have seen the report.

Then, you go to Ellie's bedroom while she's sleeping and hold your knife to her throat. _Take care of her_ , Sophie had said, _one way or another_. She's-- _it's_ an abomination. It's an abomination and it must be destroyed, just like you've done to every other Black Sky you've found, just like The Chaste has been doing for centuries.

_She's_ also your daughter.

You don't kill her. The next day, you start training her in earnest.

*

"It's wrong to kill one of ours," you tell her, and she says, "It didn't feel wrong." The others think you found her as an orphan, and when they realize she's got full gene expression they start asking questions. You tell Ellie that some day she'll be able to unleash what she has inside and you mean it. If the Black Sky is such a powerful weapon, wouldn't it be better for The Chaste to wield that weapon?

Then she kills Star's soldier, and when Star says, "If you won't kill it, I will," you know that you've lost the trust of the rest of The Chaste. They haven't been convinced that Ellie is under control, and they aren't going to stop until she's dead.

You should have killed her the day you found out.

You should have never let her be born in the first place.

But she's your responsibility now, and you still believe that maybe, _maybe_ you can keep her, let her grow up, until she's old enough to understand and to agree to be the weapon of The Chaste. To do that, you have to let her go, so that everyone else will forget she ever existed. You made Sophie disappear; you have to make Ellie disappear too.

*

The Natchios family is rich, Hugo a diplomat and Christina a philanthropist. They're not involved with The Chaste or The Hand or any other organization, but there's something in Christina's past that she's afraid will make her fail a background check by any above board adoption agency. You're not worried about Christina's youthful indiscretions, and besides, Ellie can defend herself if anything were to go wrong.

They've been dreaming of a child for years, and they'll pay well. You're not _selling_ her, you're disappearing her, but the money doesn't hurt. You tell them that Ellie's been taking martial arts lessons and make it a condition of the adoption that she be allowed to continue. "Of course," Hugo says, "as long as she will also study the fine arts that a young woman ought to know."

"What is Ellie short for?" Christina asks.

"Nothing," you say with a shrug. "You want to change her name, go ahead."

"Calling her 'Ellie' is a bit too informal for society, don't you think, dear?" she says to her husband. "How do you feel about 'Elektra?'"

"It sounds lovely, darling," he says, then turns to you. "Where do we sign?"

*

"You'll train someone else," Ellie says, crying. "You'll forget about me."

"Forget my Ellie? Never."

***

You've been tracking Matt Murdock since the chemical spill blinded him. That shipment was meant for The Hand, the formula part of a scheme to create a Black Sky if they couldn't find a natural one. Both sides have been working on retroviruses since recombinant DNA techniques became accessible, but your scientists haven't found a way to inhibit the gene and theirs haven't found a way to transfect people with it. They've made progress on increasing expression for carriers, though, and are working on creating a new army with it.

Your soldiers cause the accident, aiming to stop the shipment and destroy the reagents in a massive spill, and they succeed. They don't know that the boy who got in the middle of it is a carrier until later, when a stolen vial of his blood from the hospital is brought back to the lab. You set surveillance on the kid, just in case, and it's about a year later than they come to you with news that the boy has been orphaned and is struggling with his newly enhanced senses.

One of your undercover soldiers tells the nuns that they've heard about a man who can help special children, and slips them your name.

"They think you're getting worse," you tell the kid, listening to him thrash on the bed. "But you're not, are you kid? You're getting stronger."

*

Matt's got the strongest gene expression you've ever seen outside of Ellie, maybe even stronger than your own. You double-check his blood to make sure, but the test is clear: he's a carrier, and the chemicals activated his gene, but he doesn't have all the variants necessary to be a Black Sky. Still, training him is a risk. He's vulnerable, emotional, too religious for his own good.

You need someone who can stand up to Ellie and keep her under control when she's unleashed on the world, or take her down if that's what it comes to. You know you're too weak to kill her, you've proven that over and over again, but Matt? He doesn't know her. He might just be strong enough to do it, if he can find the detachment that a soldier needs.

"Come on, kid," you tell him. "Show me I'm not wasting my time."

*

"It's a bracelet," the kid says, "from the wrapper on the ice cream you got me when we first met." Your heart swells up and suddenly, violently, you miss Ellie. You want to hold Matt tight, crush him in your arms and tell him you'll never leave him just like you told her, and that's what makes you realize how badly you're fucking things up again.

"Your training is over," you tell him, "I can't help you anymore," and you walk out of Matt Murdock's life. The last thing you need is one more liability.

***

For the next few years, you seclude yourself. You meditate, you scheme, you gather strength and recruits. You try to cut out your heart in its entirety and set it aside.

It doesn't work.

***

You keep tabs on Ellie -- on Elektra Natchios, anyway. She shows up in tabloids, in lists of best-dressed, hardest-partying debutantes and heiresses. You send your soldiers to check on her personally, to make sure she's keeping up her training, to make sure she hasn't forgotten The Chaste and everything it stands for.

You go to see her yourself when she turns twenty.

"What's wrong?" she asks. "Didn't trust your soldiers' reports? Or were you just unhappy that I sent them back to you beaten and bruised?"

"Ellie," you begin; " _Elektra_ ," she corrects.

"Elektra. I told you I'd come back for you."

"Why are you here, Stick? What do you want from me?" She sounds -- almost hopeful. _I want my daughter back_ , you think, but it's far too late for that.

"You think you're ready for the war?" you ask instead.

"Let's find out," she says, already moving in her first attack.

*

You send Ellie out on a few missions, and she completes them satisfactorily. The targets are dead, there's no problem there, but she's still too wild. She makes more of a mess than she needs to, takes out too many people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. She _enjoys_ it more than she needs to. You need her to kill people, but you need her to understand that it's only acceptable to kill the right people.

"I thought you'd be happy," she says, cleaning her blade after the night's mission resulted in the murder of not only the Hand operatives, but all of the security personnel who had the misfortune to be on duty in the same building. "No witnesses, less coverup."

"You killed seventeen people, Ellie."

Her heart skips over a few beats. "I thought you'd be happy," she repeats.

*

You tell Ellie that you want her to recruit Matt. You tell her you want her to convince Matt to kill, to take that last step in the process. You fire her up by telling her that Matt is the only student you took after her who came close to her at all.

You don't tell her that you're sending her to Matt because you think maybe you've been going about this all wrong. Maybe the thing that will rein in Ellie isn't rigorous discipline. Maybe Matt's emotions are a strength rather than a weakness.

You've never been able to tame Ellie, but maybe Matt can.

*

She comes back to you a year later, subdued but angry. "He couldn't do it," she says. "He's too weak."

"Are you angry because you failed your mission?"

"I'm angry because he's weak," is her snippy response. "You knew he wouldn't do it. You set me up for failure."

"It was worth a shot," you say, because you're not sure if the mission was a failure or not. It would have been nice to have Matt back, to have him as a soldier, but you suppose he's not ready yet.

Maybe Ellie just isn't ready yet either.

***

"They don't get to tell you what you are," Matt says to her, anguish raw in his voice, and you know that you made the right choice sending her to him all those years ago. In the end, Ellie has to choose whether she's going to be a weapon for The Hand or for The Chaste, and you lost your voice and credibility when you left her alone with a pair of strangers.

"Matt didn't come to rescue me," you tell her, because she has to understand. "He came to save you."

"I don't need to be saved," Ellie says, and your heart aches for her.

"From yourself, girl. He knew that killing me would be your point of no return, so he stopped you. He thinks you're worth saving." You laugh, sorry that it's come to the point where in order to protect her you have to pretend you want her dead. Her bond with Matt is the only thing that's keeping her out of The Hand's grasp, and that bond is stronger the more removed from it you are. "Earn that."

*

She does.

*

You remember holding Ellie in your arms when she was just a baby, wondering about what her future would be. Was it selfish to bring a life into this world, when you knew how it was so likely to end?

"Orchids," Matt says. "She likes orchids. And yeah, Stick, it was worth it."

**Author's Note:**

> As always a million thanks to [misswonderheart](http://misswonderheart.tumblr.com) for beta reading! Also this is probably a pretty crazy headcanon that'll be totally AU when season 3 comes out, but still. I'm sure all my regular readers were expecting me to come out of season 2 with lots of filthy smut but somehow instead I wrote this? Sorry?


End file.
